My Mother's been feeling ill so I've been helping her out the last few days and she just told me of a conversation she had with her father she saw when she went abroad recently (also where she picked up her illness). During Chinese New year the topic of my grandfather's still-living friends was brought up so it was already emotional ground, but then my mother brought up one of the youngest of my grandfather's friends Talib and asked why he wasn't invited. In the old, old days, back when there were about 20 more now extinct Empires in the world, my grandfather on his way to becoming headmaster was put in charge of teaching a school of Malay children despite speaking not a single lick of Malay. My mother wrote his speeches for him and Talib looked over the speeches and taught him as much Malay as he could and in short, my grandfather's entire life could have been made or undone by Talib. My mother questioned my grandfather's loyalty to someone he owed so much to, he told her Talib had been dead for 25 years and he had never told her because of the circumstances of his death, he didn't want her to have a bad impression of him in death. He had bought some recreational medicine and was a heavy-drinking womanizer, but he wanted her to remember all of his hard work to help others through life, not the poisoned man with blood seeping from his eyes and ears. Both my mother and grandfather had warned him that the medicine looked like poison, later on my grandfather received a call from Talib's family saying what had happened. My grandfather never told anyone in our family just to preserve his memory. Despite not being Malay, Muslim or family, Talib's family asked him to follow the coffin until the very end of Talib's resting place.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9700320 times)